We Live in Stupid Times

Intelligence is now just a brand you can buy.

Increasingly, the world is being run by a group of idiot losers. I don’t say this merely to express my disgust; rather, stupid things are constantly being said and done.

Musk’s million people on Mars

SpaceX will pay Elon Musk a bonus if he gets at least one million people to live on Mars. But for that to happen, you’re going to have to terraform Mars for human habitation.

However, to achieve that on a scale of one million people will take decades, if not a century. After all, you only have to look at Dubai to see it took decades to build a functioning city, and that is here on our own planet.

The work required to put even a small team on Mars in the 2040s means we should have started the work of understanding how to terraform in the 2000s; but here’s the thing: nobody is doing that work today.

Boiling the planet to automate things we had previously automated

Earlier in the year, we witnessed the meteoric rise of OpenClaw to a level where it was acquired by OpenAI.

What the AI evangelists were screaming in excitement about was the ability to automate a whole multitude of digital services.

But here’s the thing: we used to automate that stuff anyway, because those services used to have generous, open APIs. We could easily build automations and bots, as people did, via the API.

However, it is the platforms themselves that decided to take away that access in order to keep us within their platforms. If you want to use Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, you have to use their interface. You cannot do it via a third party with another tool.

So, what we are doing is building extremely complicated systems to act like humans within those interfaces, when in actual fact we could get the exact same value if those platforms just made the API available.

AI is the future of capital, whilst simultaneously trying to eradicate the value of capital

We are being continuously told by the CEOs and founders of OpenAI and Anthropic, etc., that the future of certain jobs is coming to an end—that the ability to use your brain and your hands to produce goods and services will inevitably no longer be required.

However, this provides a glaring contradiction in their philosophy. These companies seek to serve an economy built on production and consumption, yet they tell a story in which production is no longer compensated. The problem is that without that compensation, people cannot afford to be consumers.

So the story of these AI companies is that they will diminish economic activity, but the reason they are okay with placing a $15 trillion bet is because of the economic activity they seek to create.

In other words, if AI has the ability to produce, meaning workers don’t get paid, then how will people afford the goods and services that require that production in the first place?

All of these super-smart billionaires cannot answer this question.

Hey ChatGPT, is my cake cooked?

Something popped up in my feed recently: someone uploaded an image of a cake in an oven and asked, “Is this cooked?”

ChatGPT responded that it wasn’t and that it needed to be put back in. Inevitably, the cake ended up overcooked.

For all those who don’t bake, the way you check if a sponge cake is cooked is by inserting a toothpick or wooden skewer; if it comes out clean, the cake is done.

Therefore, it’s quite clear what the stupidity is here. This person, like many others trying to shoehorn AI into every single aspect of their lives, is solving a problem that is already solved for next to nothing by implementing a solution that costs money, energy, and water yet fails to solve the problem.

Introspection est: 1910

Marc Andreessen—billionaire co-founder of Netscape and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz—recently claimed to have “zero introspection”.

Now, the first piece of stupidity is ironic: how does Marc know he lacks introspection? Unless telepathic wizards in Silicon Valley told him so, he must have come to that conclusion by looking inwards and assessing his existence in the world around him. Aka introspection.

But the second level of stupidity lies in the fact that he said introspection didn’t exist until approximately 100 years ago. Western philosophy began in the 6th century BCE in Ancient Greece with Pre-Socratic thinkers like Thales.

I’m pretty sure you don’t have to ask an AI, but the 6th century BCE was definitely more than 100 years ago.

“Thinking”

My point is, just because somebody is on a podcast with nice microphones, good cameras, and is well-edited, or that they are a multimillionaire or billionaire (or soon-to-be trillionaire), does not mean they are a smart person saying intelligent things.